Xi'an Baxian An Flea Market

The Baxian An market clusters against the high outer walls of the Eight Immortals Temple, distinguished by an endless, chaotic sprawl of blue tarps and weathered wooden tables. It began as a small gathering of vendors selling religious trinkets to temple pilgrims, but it evolved into a sprawling bazaar for antiques, coins, and relics. In the nineteen nineties, a local man named Zhang famously sold a Qing dynasty ceramic bowl he found in a nearby village, sparking a decades-long hunt for buried treasures among these alleyways.